Caveman Diet goes mainstream: how to be 'paleo-ish'

The 'paleo' eating regimen that looks back fondly to our neolithic days is
showing signs of evolution

Pressing the flesh: the paleo diet has gone mainstream, with a host of suppliers, websites and even its own festival

By Lucy Fry

7:00AM GMT 06 Mar 2015

It’s happening, whether you like it or not: the “paleo” diet, which essentially refers to eating high-quality meat and fish, lots of vegetables, some nuts, seeds, a bit of fruit, little starch and no sugar – has gone mainstream. Not only has it achieved the ultimate in linguistic circles and been crowned an adjective (I’m paleo, you’re paleo, he/she/it’s paleo), it also has its own festival (in Austin, Texas, at the end of April: paleofx.com), magazine (paleomagonline.com), restaurants, bloggers (munkeychews.blogspot.co.uk, for example, and there are plenty of others) and a “Twitter hour”. With the endless stream of paleo-related diet and cookery books coming out year on year, it remains a wonder there isn’t a paleocentric publishing company to boot.

Wow look at the time! Thanks everyone for joining #paleohour tonight, you are all fabulous. What a brilliant community we have :) #paleohour

This era of paleo dieting hit the big time, somewhat ironically, around the turn of the millennium, when American scientist Dr Loren Cordain brought the health benefits widespread attention with his book The Paleo Diet. Next, the CrossFit – a core strength and conditioning programme founded in 2000 – community leapt on board. “If it has a food label, don’t eat it,” they declared, waving grass-fed steaks like flags before heading off to complete another set of heavy squats.

But it’s not just CrossFitters and carnivores anymore. “More people are turning to the paleo diet to prevent or alleviate diseases caused by poor lifestyle choices,” says Mari Griffiths, co-founder of PaleoChef, a Wales-based paleo meal delivery service that has grown to 200-plus clients since launching a year ago. “This simple framework makes it accessible to everyone – the can’t cooks, won’t cooks and master chefs alike. No relentless calorie counting or nutrition degree is required.”

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So long as you have a socially thick skin (refusing pizza can be a surprising sticking point with some friends) and a healthy bank account, you can now go paleo without too much fuss – and, clearly, we don’t like fuss: online store cupboard and snack retailers Perfectly Paleo and Primal Snack Box both reported a tenfold increase in demand since February last year.

'No relentless calorie counting' is required for the paleo diet

This way of eating certainly has its critics. And, yes, sometimes being paleo-ish (someone who tries to live a paleo life but actually still has a life) involves using ingredients that aren’t 100 per cent unprocessed. Of course, cavemen didn’t sit around making gut-friendly pancakes with almond flour, nor did they marvel over the health-giving effects of biodynamic wine. They also didn’t have central heating, electricity or movement trackers. They didn’t need to worry about food sourcing, whether their vegetables were drenched in pesticides or their meat fed primarily on grain. They ate what was seasonally available and, thus, were unlikely to develop the kind of intolerances (who had time, anyway, given they rarely lived beyond 25?) that often result from excessive consumption of any one type of food. Caveman didn’t need to do a grizzly workout to put hairs on his chest. Cave woman didn’t need to join a muddy 10km race each weekend. They were too busy rushing around after their next meal. But these days most of us lead such sedentary lives that we need to exercise regularly, consciously and deliberately. We would also no sooner choose to spear a pigeon for dinner instead of picking one up in the supermarket than we would replace our cotton underwear with loincloth.

The caveman figure is as relevant to today’s paleo diet as a walkie-talkie is to a smartphone. There’s a similarity of purpose – healthy eating/ communication – but little similarity in how it works. The truth is that the real caveman diet was tough. Few would have chosen it if they had the option, and the criticism of many contemporary paleo foods that they aren’t what cavemen really ate is stupid. The only real issue here is one of potential overindulgence/ human nature.

“The paleo lifestyle doesn’t come with a rule book; you need to own your decisions and obviously it’s up to you not to feed yourself exclusively on paleo-friendly brownies,” says Sarah Mace, who established paleo snack company Primal Joy in October 2013.

A paleo brownie from the 'paleo snack' website Primal Joy

Yet people still find fault with what seems to be the most obvious definition of healthy eating ever known to (cave) man. First, there are the doubters: those who chomp smugly on processed bread and accuse the paleo world of hypocrisy because it serves up a paleo sticky toffee pudding that is made of organic dates, raw honey and coconut flour. This seems churlish, but is perhaps a smidgen less annoying than those at the other end of the spectrum – the “paleo police” – who pull out chicken breasts on public transport and criticise others who advocate paleo-ism for eating anything they haven’t yanked out of the ground or killed with their bare hands.

Of course, we paleo-ish individuals know it’s purer to have boiled egg and a broccoli floret than a cold-pressed bar made with seeds and cashews, but we have busy, demanding lives and a modicum of respect for vegetarians who may be travelling on the Tube with us. So, yes, we sometimes buy overpriced ready-made snacks which, crucially, contain no added chemicals, preservatives or sugar. And guess what? At first they don’t taste as immediately delicious as the sucrose-laden alternatives sold in every corner shop, but pretty soon we realise they taste better. That’s because after years of munching on sugar and trans fats, healthier “real-food” desserts and snacks take a little getting used to. But get used to them you should, if you want to have your cake and eat it – that is, enjoy the occasional raw chocolate cheesecake and not develop chronic health problems associated with a high-sugar, high-carb diet such as diabetes and heart disease. It might not be exactly what cavemen ate, but it can still be healthy and paleo-ish. So let’s all take the etymological origins of the paleo diet with a big pinch of (ideally Himalayan) salt and leave this century’s best diet trend to evolve as unnaturally as it wants.

THE PALEO DIET RULES

Lean meat and fish. Up to a third of hunter-gatherers’ diets consisted of protein

Nuts (but not peanuts, see below) and seeds

Berries. Think of the sort you might pick on a country walk, ie “wild” rather than “cultivated”

Non-starchy vegetables such as broccoli, kale, etc

DON’T EAT

Grains. Many people today are coeliac or gluten-intolerant, but paleo purists insist that gluten is bad for everyone – on somewhat shaky evidence, it’s blamed for declining brain health. Even gluten-free grains such as millet, buckwheat and rice get the bum’s rush from the paleo police

Dairy. Notwithstanding the heavy milk consumption of nomadic pastoralists such as the Maasai of east Africa, dairy is a paleono-no